The raising of raw silk in the United States at the start of the nineteenth century was a local phenomenon that remained concentrated in areas that had a colonial legacy. In the context of a fast-diversifying economy and the meteoric rise of cotton occurring in the South, it gave little hint of being a branch of agriculture that had the potential to survive in the expanding United States. But sericulture experienced a nationwide rejuvenation between 1820 and 1845, as pockets of cultivation developed across the nation, from Maine to Louisiana. Most of these efforts raised small quantities which tended to be reeled locally and inexpertly, and twisted into sewing thread, though they could hold great value and meaning to individuals and households. The chapter argues that three mutually reinforcing vehicles gave particular shape to these antebellum efforts at silk production: the agricultural press, the postal service, and the agricultural society. These packaged up a nationalist rhetoric that virtuously reconciled agriculture with manufacturing, production with consumption, and progress with nostalgia. But in spite of innovative justifications and wide uptake, many of the self-same issues that had compromised earlier efforts at sericulture eventually rose to the surface. The challenge of making silk American had been accomplished, but not that of making American silk.

The sixteenth century would witness the remarkable rise of silk production in the Spanish Empire, as Iberian conquistadors and caterpillars converged upon Meso-American Indians and mountain forests. By the 1560s, amidst the brutal extraction of gold and silver, silk production had blossomed into one of the Americas’ first post-Columbian cash crops, and for a time it sustained a manufacturing industry that helped satiate the growing markets of a Latinising America. Perhaps strangely, this first colonial attempt at establishing silk cultivation across the Atlantic – rooting in Oaxaca – would prove unquestionably the most successful of all those in the Americas, linking the victims of the European Reconquista with those of the American Conquista: a Moorish speciality became a Mixtecan Indian opportunity. But it was a function of the dramatic pace of global interconnection in the sixteenth century that, within four decades of the first harvesting of American raw silk in the 1540s, the first Asian raw silk in bulk arrived from the other direction, across the Pacific. A commercial battle followed between the valuable fibrous proteins emitted by the silkworms of Granada (in Spain and New Spain), and those of their long-distant ancestors in China. Its result, the collapse of raw silk production in New Spain, was heavily influenced by the decline of Indian populations and the paranoia of the Spanish Crown in terms of protecting peninsular interests.

The prologue explains how silkworms became an object of fascination in early modern Europe, as their economic and physiological properties began to be more thoroughly understood in areas far distant from the regions in which silk raising (sericulture) originated. It outlines the book’s objective, which is to offer a deep and wide-ranging interrogation of raw silk’s failure as a commodity produced in the Atlantic world. By attending more to historical experimentation and failure, it argues that we can better understand what was distinctive about sericulture and what was particular about the Atlantic world complex: its vast distance, cultural hybridisation, colonial fragility, and manufacturing imbalances. The chapter tracks the global history of sericulture’s spread outward from Neolithic China, synthesising existing scholarship to identify certain prerequisites that accompanied its successful transplantation from one region to another, and variations in systems of production. These included availability of materials, the environmental capacity to accommodate the effective symbiosis of Bombyx mori (silkworms) and Morus (mulberry) trees on which they feed, an adequate seasonal labour pool, and migrant expertise to help establish production and instruct in more complicated processes. It closes by considering the particular opportunities and challenges presented by the Atlantic barrier and oceanic transmission.

This chapter explores how colonial authorities and settlers, in first Carolina and later Georgia, made substantial efforts to introduce silkworms to the southern boundaries of British America across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These attempts at sericulture played a significant part in influencing schemes for and arguments about economic development in the Lower South. They generated innovation in the justification and practice of state investment; taxes paid for public enslaved labourers and their training, bounties, filatures; and the global sourcing of technical knowledge, experts, and technology. As with the French and Armenian immigrants to Virginia, stretching towards silk helped to bring Huguenots, Swiss, and Italians to the Lower South, to shape schemes for westward expansion, and to broaden the employment of enslaved people. The investment left cultural, material, and environmental legacies within many households, markets, and estates in the region, as mulberries proliferated. The depth of interest ensured that these well-supported initiatives generated noteworthy output, centralised in dedicated buildings (filatures), through which agents sought to control quality and improve proficiency. The conquest of silkworms appealed to many planters in search of metropolitan recognition, who in spite of later racialised claims, deployed their bondspeople widely in the pursuit.

The independence of the United States blew apart the projected formula that had held sway for over 150 years in British regions persisting with sericulture – namely, that raw silk might be produced on the western side of the Atlantic and then manufactured on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Opportunistic schemes were proposed to create silk manufactures and to reorganise trade in silks, as American and European merchants and entrepreneurs sought to take advantage of the fraying of Anglo-American links, and to create new systems of production and distribution. Their earnest efforts revealed that there remained a lively appetite for silk goods amongst American consumers that soon re-emerged in the early 1780s: self-denial had been a means of revolution, but it was not an end. In the final quarter of the eighteenth century, political economists and silk producers alike made important strides towards ensuring a future for silk production, and they largely did so by linking it to American manufacturing. In contrast to the imperial regression in Atlantic domains, new expectations and new pressures developed among those regions of Europe that continued to fulfil sericulture’s prerequisites in the early nineteenth century.

France’s introduction of mulberries and silkworms originated in the pincer-like arrival of resources and expertise across both its Spanish and Italian borders, and production would last through to the end of the nineteenth century, concentrated in southern regions. This chapter considers the moments of acceleration in the seventeenth century when French schemes (pushed by agronomists and political economists) sought to carry production to new regions. The fact that French domestic production of raw silk never came close to the quantity or quality required by its silk industry encouraged new ambitions overseas. The chapter tracks in turn the idiosyncratic projects in the French Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, and the more concerted ambitions and undertakings in Louisiana in the early eighteenth century – in both of which cases, enslaved labourers were mobilised for a time to nurture silkworms and reel silk, and women played prominent roles. French efforts around the Caribbean basin were compromised by competition with other crops, by the instability of the region’s geopolitics, and by a host of commodity-specific threats which showed up the fragility of silkworms. Even while French New World prospects of sericulture retreated, however, production was consolidated and deepened at home, thanks to environmental and labour advantages.